How to Apply For Jobs Online

Click, click and click. This is the all too familiar sound you experience applying for a job, after job, after job, with basically nothing to show for all your time and effort. Are you sick and tired of applying for jobs online, wondering if your resume is even being looked at? In this short article, I will lay out for you exactly how to apply for jobs online in 5 simple steps.

If you are unsure where you should even be applying for jobs, I would highly recommend that you take a look at our article Where to Apply for Jobs Online before continuing.

Perfect the resume

I know this is the last thing that you want to hear, so I will not spend a lot of time on it but it is absolutely crucial that you are refining and optimizing your resume for whatever type of job you are going after. This is the number one priority when learning how to apply for jobs online.

Did you know that over 60% of companies use something called an Applicant Tracking System (ATS)? This is a form of software that screens your resume before it even gets in the hand of the recruiter or hiring manager. If you don’t have the exact keywords on your resume that they are looking for, your resume may not even get looked at.

There are a ton of free resume builder tools out there to help you craft a great resume. If you would rather leave it in the hands of a professional, there are also a lot of great paid services where you can hire someone to do the work for you. For more information on resumes, take a look at How To Write A Professional Resume.

Don’t wait

Have you ever been lead on by a recruiter or staffing agency? They give you a call, ask you all about yourself, and tell you about a position that you could “potentially” be a great fit for!? If you haven’t yet, you will. Many recruiters mislead job seekers into believing that they will get a job, so you become content thinking; “Oh, I spoke with a couple of recruiters who are trying to help me find a job, I can relax now.” Unfortunately, that's just not true and I bet that it hasn't really been working out for you. Am I right?

The point is, don’t wait! If a recruiter gives you a call, you can guarantee that the same recruiter is going to call another 100 people by the end of the day. Make sure you are constantly applying for jobs online instead of waiting for a callback from a recruiter you spoke to a week ago.

There is also another point to be made regarding not waiting. Have you ever gone on a job board such as Indeed and seen a job that was posted only 6 days ago that already has 100+ applicants? Good luck landing that job. At that point, the hiring manager is so swamped with resumes that you can guarantee he/she will not be looking at all of them. This is where that ATS comes in handy for the hiring manager. Being among the first 10 applicants to apply for a job is absolutely crucial! How do you do this? Well, you need to be constantly checking the job boards. Use their filters in order to find the most recently posted jobs and apply to a few each day as they come up. This is exactly how to apply for jobs online like a pro.

Apply in bulk

This one does not need much of an explanation. We talked about this briefly under the “Don’t wait” section. The main point here is that you should not be applying for one or two jobs and then waiting for a callback. No recruiter or hiring manager is going to know how many jobs you have applied to online. Apply to as many relevant jobs as possible to increase your chances of landing an interview. This is simply the law of large numbers at work. The next section will explain how to apply for jobs online in bulk, without wasting a ton of your time.

Quick apply

Quick apply features are great! Not every company is going to have them but for those that do, take advantage of them! If you are unsure what this is, quick apply is basically a feature that allows you to apply for a job in as little as one click; instead of having to fill out an entire job application.

Some online job boards that offer these features are ZipRecruiter, Indeed, CareerBuilder, and the list goes on. However, in order to fully take advantage of these quick apply features, it is extremely important that you invest some time up front making sure that your profiles on these job boards are top notch.

Invest time in a profile

Every job board is going to ask you to upload your resume so that it can create your unique profile. The problem is, some of these job boards do not do a very good job at making sure all of the content on your resume goes into the right places on the profile. They will put your education where your work history should go, and your list of skills where your summary should go. They are all over the place.

This is why it is important to invest time up front making sure that your information is in the correct fields. Also, take a moment to fill out each section of your profile with as much detail as possible. Taking a few extra minutes to make a great profile will save you hours of filling out job applications.

Now that you know how to apply for jobs online; go boot up your computer and do it! There is no better time than the present. “Don’t wait!”

The FMP Contributor

The FMP Contributor is the daily publication of Find My Profession. Your #1 career advice resource.

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